According to IBM’s IT security standards for backups, applications must have data backup solutions based upon their business criticality value. The large on-premises infrastructure at IBM requires having a backup team familiar with the production applications hosted by the IBM Chief Information Office (CIO) organization.
To help eliminate operational complexity for backup administrators, the CIO organization sought a solution to consolidate multiple siloed practices and streamline enterprise backup management. The intention was for the application owners across the enterprise to use a centralized cloud-based solution to manage backups according to IBM’s standards and to protect the on-premises infrastructure.
The CIO organization implemented a cloud-based data protection solution using IBM Business Partner Cobalt Iron (link resides outside of ibm.com) and IBM technology, including IBM® Storage Protect and IBM Storage FlashSystem®. Cobalt Iron offered a centralized self-service portal to control and configure backups, schedules and policies. It also provided a dashboard to see the status and health of the protected environment. Storage Protect provided data resilience for physical file servers, virtual environments and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications while IBM FlashSystem delivered flash array storage with low latency.
The solution provided a centralized portal with enterprise-class backup and restore features for Red Hat® containers, Red Hat virtual machines, IBM AIX®, Microsoft Windows, Linux® and Linux on IBM Z, as well as IBM Db2® and SQL databases. It integrated nodes from multiple platforms to streamline the CIO hosted production applications backup and restore procedures by providing a single pane of glass to execute all operational management directly from the portal including provisioning new systems, changing schedules and adjusting management policies.
Going forward, the CIO organization plans to continue providing second-level support to the application owners and collaborating with Cobalt Iron to help further enhance product features and capabilities.
With this new enterprise backup solution, the CIO organization delivered a unified user experience by having a single-entry point for all application owners to configure and maintain the IBM backup infrastructure. About 400 application owners can now leverage a single portal to configure, schedule, create and restore backups. The Cobalt Iron portal simplifies the backup and restore processes for applications owners to protect petabytes of critical production application data.
The IBM Chief Information Officer (CIO) organization leads IBM’s internal IT strategy and is responsible for delivering, securing, modernizing and supporting the IT solutions that IBM employees, clients and partners use to do their jobs every day. The CIO organization’s strategy encompasses creating an adaptive IT platform that makes IT tools, applications and systems easier to access across the enterprise, accelerates problem-solving and serves as an innovation engine for IBM, catalyzing business growth.
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